Learning new things can be extremely stimulating and essential to advancing your career. The body feeds off of taking on new things and testing your knowledge and level of performance in a variety of areas and other tasks. Not only is it good for your brain improving your health and memory, new skills allow you to increase your mental wellbeing and happiness and allows you to be adaptable in life.
Start by Brainstorming
Learning keeps your mind engaged and body active and that thought alone can put pressure of choosing the right areas to focus on. Learning is extremely subjective and because of that, it can be absolutely anything you have interest in or see return on investment in. The idea may come naturally, but the key is to remember that learning something entirely new can still have an impact on your everyday priorities, without the pressure of it being directly correlated to your career, it can simply refresh your mind and help you think differently.
Deconstruct Your Goal
Like any goal, learning a new skill can be broken down so you have a clear plan to reach your desired outcome. Once you’ve brainstormed the idea and decide what it is you want to achieve, Break down the skill that you want to learn into little pieces and learn techniques to master an isolated portion. The small pieces will come together to make up the whole skill.
For example, when you’re learning to play the guitar, learn how to press down a chord pattern with your fingers first without even trying to strum the chord. Once you are able to change between a couple of chord patterns, then add the strumming.
Use the Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle also known as the 80 20 rule allows you to identify the 20% of the work that will give you 80% of the results.The trick is to discover what that 20% is so we can apply our most effort to that 20% and eliminate as much of the 80% that does not produce the results we want.
Once you’ve reverse engineered your new skill, put together the list of all key components and then flag or highlight the tasks that will give you the biggest contribution towards attaining the skill. Those tasks will be the 20% of tasks that will take you 80% of the way towards completing the project. Focus on those.
Find a Mentor
Success leaves clues. The best short cut to become an expert is to find an expert and not have to make the mistakes that they have made.
Finding out what NOT to do from the expert will fast-track your learning when you want to learn new skills. It is a huge win to have them personally walk you through what needs to be done. Reach out and send an email to them.
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